the same beneficial change in Dargomijsky that Rubinstein's influence brought about in Tchaikovsky some thirty years later; it changed him from a mere dilettante into a serious musician. "Glinka's example," he wrote in his autobiography, "who was at that time (1834) taking Prince Usipov's band through the first rehearsals of his opera _A Life for the Tsar_, assisted by myself and Capellmeister Johannes, led to my decision to study the theory of music. Glinka handed over to me the five exercise books in which he had worked out Dehn's theoretical system and I copied them in my own hand, and soon assimilated the so-called mysterious wisdom of harmony and counterpoint, because I had been from childhood practically prepared for this initiation and had occupied myself with the study of orchestration." These were the only books of theory ever studied by Dargomijsky, but they served to make him realise the possession of gifts hitherto unsuspected. After this course of self-instruction he felt strong enough to try his hand as an operatic composer, and selected a libretto founded on Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris." Completed and translated into Russian in 1839, the work, entitled _Esmeralda_, was not accepted by the Direction of the Imperial Opera until 1847, when it was mounted for the first time at Moscow. By this time Dargomijsky had completely outgrown this immature essay. The light and graceful music pleased the Russian public, but the success of this half-forgotten child of his youth gave little satisfaction to the composer himself. He judged the work in the following words: "The music is slight and often trivial--in the style of Halévy and Meyerbeer; but in the more dramatic scenes there are already some traces of that language of force and realism which I have since striven to develop in my Russian music." In 1843 Dargomijsky went abroad, and while in Paris made the acquaintance of Auber, Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Fétis. The success of _Esmeralda_ encouraged him to offer to the Directors of the Imperial Theatre an opera-ballet entitled _The Triumph of Bacchus_, which he had originally planned as a cantata; but the work was rejected, and only saw the light some twenty years later, when it was mounted in Moscow. Dargomijsky's correspondence during his sojourn abroad is extremely interesting, and shows that his views on music were greatly in advance of his time and quite free from the influences of fashion and convention.